October 30, 2012 8:55pm EDTOctober 30, 2012 10:16am EDTCody Zeller is part basketball star, part leader, part role model and even part goofball. But SN's preseason player of the year is all Indiana — and Hoosiers fans are counting on him to bring home a national title.

The signs are almost as famous as the names on them. Posted along several entry points to Washington, Ind., the signs bid visitors welcome and pay homage to the city’s four most famous sons—Steve Bouchie and Luke, Tyler and Cody Zeller, all of whom were named Indiana’s Mr. Basketball.

Cody is the youngest of the Zellers, and after Tyler (the middle brother) won the award in 2008, Cody drove by one of the signs nearly every day and wondered whether he’d eventually see his own name hanging there.

After he led the Washington Hatchets to the state championship in 2011 for his third title in four seasons, he thought he had a good chance to win it. He knew how the process worked, having seen his brothers go through it. The winner was notified late in the week, and the announcement was made the following Sunday.

His phone rang on Tuesday night while he ate dinner at a restaurant with his mom, Lorri, and dad, Steve. He wasn’t expecting the call for a few more days, and because he didn’t recognize the number, he put the phone back in his pocket without answering it. Five seconds later, his mom’s phone rang. She fished it out of her purse, answered it and handed it to him.

The caller asked whether he’d like to represent the state of Indiana as Mr. Basketball. “I said, ‘Yeah, that would be a great honor,’ or whatever.” Here he laughs. “I’ll check my schedule and get back to you.”

Cody Zeller bounces between saying not winning Mr. Basketball would not have been a big deal and, um, telling the truth. He and his brothers are so competitive with each other that they turn Christmas morning into a present-opening contest. When they skip rocks across a lake, each tries to beat the others’ count. They also have pizza- and pancake-eating contests ... though from the looks of them nobody ever wins those.

“I was kind of joking about it—I always have a pretty easygoing outlook on it, but I was like, Man it’s going to suck if I don’t win Mr. Basketball, with Luke and Tyler up there,” Cody said.

As he enters his sophomore season at Indiana, he has a chance to do something Luke and Tyler never did: lead his team to a national championship. (Tyler won one, but it was as a bit player as a freshman at UNC, and the closest Luke got at Notre Dame was the second round.) And not just any team, but the only team that matters in the great state of Indiana. If Cody leads the Hoosiers to the national championship, Washington is going to need a bigger sign.

* * *

The locker room in the bowels of Assembly Hall is empty save for one impossibly tall teenager. He’s so big it’s a wonder he gets in here without a crane removing the roof. When he stands, he unfolds like a magician’s handkerchief—there is more and more of him, and just when it seems like he’s done, there’s more still.

Cody Zeller is covered in a layer of sweat after an early afternoon workout. The red, er, crimson, from his size 16 shoes has turned his white, er, cream socks and ankle braces slightly pink. Each sock has at least one hole, revealing that even his toes are big.

His legs are longer than IU’s national championship drought, his voice deeper than the fans’ desire for another one. He’s 19 and officially 7-foot and 240 pounds, but he continues to get taller and thicker, and the bigger he gets, the better IU gets. It is upon his increasingly stronger, increasingly broader shoulders that IU fans have placed their hopes for another title.

The Hoosiers took the first steps back to prominence last season, when they started 12-0 and made it to the Sweet 16. With Zeller and all but one of the team’s key contributors back, Indiana is primed to win its first national championship since 1987, but the Hoosiers will go only as far as Zeller carries them.

He is the rare young big man with a refined game, the result of years of playing against highly skilled and much bigger brothers and for a Hall of Fame high school coach (Gene Miiller) who is obsessed with fundamentals. Zeller is a basketball player who is big rather than a big man. He is exceptional in transition, a great passer and a voracious rebounder. He’s a good free-throw shooter (75.5 percent last season) for anyone, great for a 7-foot (and rising) sophomore. He says his father and Miiller pounded it into his head that height was no excuse for shooting poorly from the line.

Zeller led Indiana in scoring last year at 15.6 points per game while making 62.3 percent of his shots. But head coach Tom Crean uses a 3-point stat to show Zeller’s real influence on the team’s offense. The year before he arrived, Indiana ranked 157th in the nation in 3-point shooting. In his freshman season, the team ranked second.

Zeller’s numbers likely will be better this season, as Crean is pushing him to be more aggressive with the ball. That will lead to one of two things, and probably both: He’ll score (even) more, and the team’s 3-point shooting will get (even) better.

Here’s how good Zeller is: Crean asked him to work in offseason pickup games on a skill he rarely uses in a game—defending a man on the perimeter. The coach wanted his star out of his comfort zone, to see the game from a different angle and to think about it from a different perspective. Many big men would look like a giraffe on roller skates if they did that. But Zeller is athletic enough that he is at least trying.

Zeller’s impact off the court is important, too. He is more mature for his age than any player Crean has ever coached. “There’s never anybody around Cody who you say, ‘I wonder who that is. I wonder what his agenda is,’ ” Crean said.

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The Zellers, Cody included, carry themselves with face-forward, Christ-centered earnestness. Cody’s twitter bio (@czeller40) says nothing about him but is instead a verse from Philippians: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Or maybe that says everything about him. The Zellers believe providence, not luck, landed them in the best area in the country from which three basketball-loving 7-footers could sprout. As a young married couple, Lorri and Steve Zeller bounced from Iowa, where Luke was born; to California, where Tyler was born; to Minnesota, where Cody was born, before settling in Washington, Ind. (about 60 miles southwest of Bloomington), where Lorri jokes she told Steve to buy a dog.

It’s almost like Washington knew the Zeller boys were coming—and couldn’t wait for them to grow up. The city had a storied basketball history, with three state titles and a Mr. Basketball (Bouchie was on the 1981 Indiana team that won the national championship). Sam Alford, father of Indiana legend Steve, played there. The basketball team plays at the Hatchet House. It seats 7,090 and averaged roughly 5,000 while the Zellers played.

It is often said of small towns like Washington that everybody knows everybody. But that’s not true. While eating dinner recently at Bobe’s Pizza Express—Washington’s place to see and be seen—Lorri Zeller looked around at the 30 people enjoying steak night. She knew only 20 of them. Safe bet: All 30 know who the Zellers are.

Steve Zeller, who’s 6-4, works at the turkey processing plant in town. Lorri (6-0) recently left her job in the high school athletics department to work for the family’s nonprofit organization, Distinxion.

Conceived by Luke when he was playing at Notre Dame, Distinxion teaches character and basketball, in that order. Distinxion holds camps across Indiana that Cody attends when he can, and it runs regular classes at its church gym in Washington.

On the wall there is Distinxion’s motto, which spells out CHAMPIONS: Character, Honesty, Attitude, Motivation, Perseverance, I am Responsible, Optimism, Network of friends, Serve others. One night in August, Steve Zeller was working with trainer Bryce Bow and a handful of students. Before they took their first shot, Bow assigned them a drill: Greet the visitor, shake his hand with a firm grip, look him in the eye and say, “Welcome to Washington.” This they all did, with varying degrees of firmness and in-the-eye-looking.

Also on the wall is a verse from Colossians: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.”

The same verse is on a plaque on Crean’s desk in Bloomington.If Washington had a Zellers-shaped hole in its basketball heart before the family arrived, so too did Indiana before Cody Zeller got there. The program was in a shambles when Crean took over in 2008. From the time he got the job, Crean identified Zeller as crucial to the rebuilding process. The team needed to get better, and it needed to do so with high-character, homegrown talent.

The day in 2010 Zeller committed to Indiana has become a watershed moment in the team’s recent history. Crean says fans “remember where they were” when they saw Zeller make his announcement, which he did wearing a hoodie while inside the Hatchet House. Dozens of media outlets covered it. The hype grew, if that was possible, when Zeller arrived on campus. He inspired a rap song, fake Twitter accounts and a nickname, The Big Handsome.

But if the team didn’t win, none of that would matter. Nine games into last season, the attention was validated, and all it took was one of the most famous shots in the history of the program.

COLLEGE BASKETBALL 2012-13

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Christian Watford deserves all the credit. He made the last-second 3-pointer that lifted Indiana over No. 1 Kentucky last December and was the ringing of the bell that heralded the Hoosiers’ return to relevance.

When Crean was asked to name moments from last season that showed Zeller was the real thing, he picked Zeller’s first basket at Assembly Hall, how he rebounded from a bad game against Michigan State and his heady play that made Watford’s shot possible.

As Verdell Jones brought the ball up the court, Zeller saw a defender who was looking to try to intentionally foul him. Showing uncommon court sense, Zeller rushed out of position to block the defender’s path. That freed Jones to make it to the wing unfouled and get the ball to Watford before the buzzer sounded.

Playing against his brothers, Cody learned how to be creative to get shots, how to play against bigger and stronger opponents and how to compete fiercely but walk away after the game and be nice. He also learned, and continues to learn, by watching them.

Last season, when Tyler Zeller played for North Carolina, Duke’s Austin Rivers hit a last-second 3-pointer to lift Duke over UNC, one of the most dramatic shots in the history of that rivalry. Tyler was criticized for not getting in Rivers’ face to contest the shot.

A few months later, Indiana was in the closing seconds against VCU in the NCAA Tournament. VCU had the ball with a chance to win. In the huddle, as Indiana discussed defensive switches, Cody vowed to be aggressive. “I even told someone, ‘You better believe I’m going to get out. I’m not going to have a Tyler moment.’ ”

When the play started, Cody blitzed a screen and jumped out on the ballhandler at the 3-point line. That forced the VCU player to drive into the lane. He had no chance to shoot over Zeller, so he passed to a man on the wing. He missed the shot, and the Hoosiers won.

* * *

Crean has compared Zeller to Andrew Luck, the former Stanford star quarterback who was drafted first overall this spring by the Indianapolis Colts. Crean is married to the sister of Jim Harbaugh, Luck’s coach at Stanford and now the coach of the San Francisco 49ers.

The comparison works on multiple levels. Early in their careers, both showed dedication to fundamentals and displayed on-field awareness that most players need years to develop.

Both play with intensity on the field but are goofballs off it. When Cody Zeller was in high school, his mom worked in the athletic department. He often hid her stapler in the ceiling panels, which he could reach from his tiptoes. He did the same thing with teachers’ lesson plans. He also liked to get to class early and move the clock ahead 10 minutes.

But the comparison falls apart in one crucial area: At Stanford, Luck never faced anything like the pressure Zeller is under. From the day Zeller committed to Indiana, he has been called the savior of the program.

If this bothers him, nobody knows it.

“He never gets too high or too low. He stays on such an even keel,” said Miiller, Zeller’s high school coach. “When you watch him, sometimes people get the idea that Cody’s not real competitive because he just stays in that easygoing demeanor. But he’s very competitive.”

Zeller shrugs off questions about saving the program or relies on cliches—he vows to take the season “one day at a time” four times in an hour. The high expectations he faces at Indiana are a difference of degree from his time in Washington, not a new experience. He was in junior high the first time he signed an autograph—someone recognized him as a Zeller and expected based on that alone that he’d make something of himself one day. He wasn’t expected to be a good high school basketball player or even a great one, he was expected to be the best in the state. And he was.

He has been around big-time basketball for far longer than most players his age. He met John Wooden, whose legendary career began in Indiana, when he was in sixth grade. The setting was a hotel lobby at a McDonald’s All America game, in which Luke played. Wooden was sitting at a table, signing autographs. He called Cody over, by name. Stand there, he said. So Cody did. Now move a little, Wooden told him. Cody looked down at this frail old man, this living legend, and wondered what was going on. But he didn’t say anything. He did as he was told. A little more, Wooden said again, the man at the end of greatness instructing the kid still years from it. Again, Cody complied.

Wooden was using him to keep the sun out of his eyes. For once, the youngest brother was casting the shadow.